Designing an antenna can be a complicated task because of the inherent properties of electromagnetics. Antenna engineers may physically scale or modify conventional antennas to best meet a particular application. However, in many instances, this approach is suboptimal because a suitable conventional antenna may not exist to meet a particular need. Antennas with broadband frequency coverage are desirable so the antenna can operate in a greater number of applications, but many conventional antennas with broadband coverage also have inadequacies that render them ultimately unacceptable.
For example, a multi-turn spiral antenna is a broadband antenna. However, the gain of the spiral antenna can be essentially flat with frequency. The optimal use of the aperture area may yield a gain that increases over frequency. Another example of a broadband antenna is the bow-tie antenna. A bow-tie antenna will radiate over a wide range of frequencies. Because the direction of radiation for the bow-tie antenna changes over the range of frequency, this feature may render the bowtie as suboptimal. Furthermore, static broadband antennas deliver, by definition, a broad spectrum of energy to the associated radio(s). Each radio may require a relatively narrow operating band at any given time, and therefore the majority may enter the radio front-end as noise. It is with respect to these and other considerations that embodiments of the present invention are directed.